Ushuaia consolidates as south hemisphere cruise hub

With 396 cruise vessel calls this season Ushuaia in the extreme south of Argentina’s Tierra del Fuego confirms its hub condition for the industry in the southern hemisphere, according to local authorities.

Ushuaia not only hosts cruise vessels touring the two oceans, plus the region’s fiords and canals but also is the main access to Antarctica, which this year is scheduled to total 290 incursions into the icy waters.

“This is the result of an excellent coordination between the National Tourism Secretary, currently headed by Enrique Meyer and our local authorities”, said Daniel Leguizamón, Ushuaia Tourism Office secretary.

“This not only refers to the interesting expenditure from visitors landing at the different cities and ports they visit but also to the provision of supplies and services to the huge cruise vessels during the season which extends from November to April”, indicated Leguizamon.

Precisely last Friday the “Mariner of the Seas” called in at Ushuaia with 2.300 passengers and 1.175 crew and service members.

Although too large to berth, an estimated forty tenders transported tourists from the bay to shore for a full day of local touring, walking and shopping.

Leguimazon said that basically three types of cruise vessels operate from Ushuaia.

Possibly the most important for the city are the Antarctic cruises over which Ushuaia has a virtual monopoly with 90% of schedules.

Another segment is the rather small cruise vessels which travel among the Tierra del Fuego canals, through Cape Horn and the Beagle glaciers.

These are mainly two, “Mare Australis” and “Via Australis”, on a weekly scheduled, 120 passengers each, between Punta Arenas and Ushuaia.

“They carry people from all over the world, they are very popular and 90% are foreigners”, said Leguizamon.

Finally you have the heavy weights that travel both oceans, south along the Atlantic, Rio do Janeiro, Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Puerto Madryn, then Punta Arenas, Puerto Montt and Valparaiso in Chile.

Some names include “Infinity”, “Europa”, “Radiance of the Sea”, “Norwegian Sun”, all of them with over 2.000 passengers and tourists not necessarily involved in the whole tour, but different legs.

Finally Leguizamon said that the port facilities of Ushuaia had been expanded in 1994 to address the encouraging number of cruise vessels, but cargo movement has also increased and a further extension is needed.

“The new expansion project includes the idea of a dock specifically for container trading, so we can have more space for cruises”, said Leguizamon.

About Ushuaia

Ushuaia (pronounced [u'swaia]) is the capital of the Argentine province of Tierra del Fuego and the southernmost city in the world. Ushuaia is located in a wide bay on the southern coast of the island of Tierra del Fuego, guarded on the north by the Martial mountain range and on the south by the Beagle Channel. Its population is estimated today at about 64,000. It is the only municipality in the Department of Ushuaia, which has an area of 9,390 km2 (3,625 sq mi).Ushuaia is surrounded by Magellanic subpolar forests; on the hills around the town, the following indigenous trees are local to the area: Drimys winteri (Winter’s bark), Maytenus magellanica (hard log mayten) and several species of Nothofagus that give to the landscape a magnificent greenness.

The city was originally named by early British colonists after the name that the native Yámana people had for the area. Much of the early history of the city and its hinterland is described in great detail in Lucas Bridges’s book Uttermost Part of the Earth (1948).

For most of the first half of the 20th century, the city was centered around a prison for serious criminals. The Argentine government set up this prison following the example of the British with Australia or the French with Devil’s Island; escape from a prison on Tierra del Fuego was similarly impossible. The prisoners thus became forced colonists and spent much of their time cutting wood in the forest around the prison and building the town. They also built a railway to the settlement, now a tourist attraction known as the End of the World Train (Tren del Fin del Mundo), the southernmost railway in the world.

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SOURCES:

“Ushuaia consolidates as south hemisphere cruise hub”
Mercopress
Monday, February 2, 2009
Montevideo, Uruguay
http://www.mercopress.com
http://www.mercopress.com/vernoticia.do?id=15952&formato=HTML

“Ushuaia”
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://www.wikipedia.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ushuaia,_Argentina